Fiona Carswell

Rooted is a collection of works on paper that meditate on the permeability between the human body and the Irish landscape — a terrain shaped by centuries of conflict, resistance, and reclamation. At a time when the world feels increasingly unstable, these works articulate a quiet counter-movement of turning toward stillness. Fields, nests, and burrows become sites of withdrawal and recalibration, places where the body might enter into dialogue with something more enduring and cyclical than itself. As Voltaire wrote in Candide, “we must cultivate our garden” — a reminder that when systems falter around us, we return to what can still be tended. Rendered in fine pencil detail, the images tempt a slower kind of observing that mirrors the grounded, reverent practice of tending, itself.